Smart protection against water damage

For over 75 years, Rehau has been working towards a sustainable and innovative future, in line with the motto "Engineering progress. Enhancing lives." The company was involved in major innovations such as the first plastic window profile and the bumper for the VW Passat in the 1970s. Today, around a third of all cars are fitted with Rehau bumpers, which are now equipped with integrated sensors and cameras. The automotive sector remains one of the most important business areas, supplemented by products for building services, in particular durable plastic pipes, which used to be made of copper or steel. Rehau is also the global market leader in turf heating systems for sports stadiums and supplies numerous preliminary products for the furniture industry.

In contrast to the previous solution, it quickly became clear to Rehau that the new device should be networked via WiFi and that the onboarding process should also be supported via Bluetooth. This combination makes it possible to guide customers with no prior technical knowledge through the onboarding process in just a few steps in order to connect the device to the internet. As a benchmark for intuitive usability, grandcentrix and Rehau looked to the products of a well-known Californian company that is known for its exemplary user guidance. The app was consistently developed platform-specifically for Android and iOS in the respective programming environment in order to support all native features and ensure the best possible stability and response speed of the app.

The smart device provides consumption statistics based on the recorded flow rate. This provides the customer with a graphical overview of consumption by time of day and trend over time. As a result, the user develops a better awareness of resource-conserving behavior. RE.GUARD also informs users about potential contamination of pipes and sends water hygiene warnings as push notifications. This is important in buildings that are unoccupied for long periods, such as vacation homes. The product and app thus become a regular companion for users.

Right from the start, Rehau and grandcentrix focused on agile and parallel development of hardware, cloud backend and app. In addition to intensive market research, customer feedback on the first product version was also taken into account. Early tests in the water lab allowed valuable user feedback to be integrated directly into the ongoing development. On this basis, the user interface of the app was streamlined and the design optimized. The app is now clearly divided into three sections: a dashboard for an overview of all important parameters, a section for notifications and another section for user settings.